Hogarth Heads to the ‘Moon’ for Calhoun

Crown’s Hogarth imprint has taken North American rights to Kenneth Calhoun’s novel, Black Moon. Editor Zack Wagman acquired the work, in a pre-empt, from Claudia Ballard at William Morris Endeavor. (In a simultaneous deal, WME’s Cathryn Summerhayes, on behalf of Ballard, sold U.K. and Commonwealth rights to the book to Clara Farmer at Hogarth U.K.; the two imprints plan to jointly publish in February 2014.) Calhoun, a graphic designer who teaches at Boston’s Lasell College, has written stories for a number of literary magazines, including Tin House and the Paris Review; Black Moon is his first novel. Hogarth said the work, which is speculative fiction, examines “how society loses its grip on itself through the lens of an insomniac epidemic.”

Casey Goes YA for Minotaur

Jane Casey signed a three-book deal with her current publisher, Macmillan’s Minotaur Books, to do her first YA series; book one in the trilogy is called How to Fall. Editorial director Kelley Ragland bought North American rights from Zoë Pagnamenta, at the Zoë Pagnamenta Agency. (Pagnamenta brokered the sale on behalf of Ariella Feiner at United Agents.) Fall, which is scheduled for 2014, follows a modern-day teenage detective, Jess Tennant, who is patterned after Nancy Drew. Minotaur said the series is “in the style of the Nancy Drew thrillers, but with a contemporary twist.” Minotaur released Casey’s latest, The Reckoning, in May 2012.

Boudreaux Preps for Battle with Payton

For HarperCollins’s Ecco imprint, Lee Boudreaux pre-empted U.S. rights to Brian Payton’s novel, The Wind Is Not a River. The book revolves around the only battle of WWII fought on U.S. soil, which took place on the Aleutian Islands (they are situated off the coast of Alaska) in 1942. There, an American journalist who was shot down faces the choice between starvation and surrendering to the Japanese. While the hero fights to survive, the woman he left behind sets out on a journey to find him. Victoria Sanders, who has an eponymous agency, represented Payton; Ecco plans to publish Wind in winter 2014.

Warren Immortalizes Her Kitty

Lissa Warren, a senior v-p of publicity at Da Capo Press, sold a memoir about her cat Ting to Keith Wallman at Lyons Press. Peter Rubie, CEO of FinePrint Literary Management, represented Warren (who also wrote The Savvy Author’s Guide to Book Publicity) in the world rights deal. In The Good Luck Cat, Warren writes about her purebred Korat—a breed distinguished by its coat of short, gray hair—which helped her family through her father’s untimely death (and also wound up having its own heart problem). Wallman said the book will also “weave in threads about the cultural and historical roles cats have played in death and grieving.”

Briefs

Kate Sullivan at Candlemark & Gleam bought world English rights to Grave by Hilary Hall (writing under the pseudonym Joan Francis Turner). Hall was represented by Jita Fumich, who closed the deal on behalf of Michelle Brower at Folio Literary Management. Grave marks the final book in the author’s Resurgam trilogy and is set in a postapocalyptic world where zombies and humans have been at war for years. The first two books in this series, Dust (2010) and Frail (2011), were published by Ace.